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Topic for the Year 2008–2009:
“Food, Self, and Community:
Tradition and Transformation in Jewish and Christian Eating”
Co-Chairs: Moriah Hazani and Virginia Wayland
(University of Pennsylvania)
Food is often a significant focus for the maintenance of group identities,
cohesion of communities, and expression of cultural ideals and assumptions.
Choices such as what one does (and does not) eat and with whom one shares
meals can thus tell us much about individual and groups — as do choices to
abstain from eating practices common in a society at large. Practices such
as feasting, fasting, and food-related charity are frequently central to the
expression of piety, community, and identity. Ritual meals, moreover, can
serve as a nexus for the memorialization of the cherished past and the
preservation of traditions about it. In addition, eating practices can
function as a powerful tool for social differentiation, establishing and
enacting the boundaries between various groups within an otherwise shared
culture.
This year’s PSCO will explore our evidence for early Jewish and Christian
eating practices in their shifting Hellenistic and Roman cultural contexts.
In keeping with the focus on “Change” in this year’s Penn Humanities Forum,
our discussions will center on the dynamic interplay between tradition and
transformation. We will ask, on the one hand, how the encounter with “pagan”
religions and philosophies may have shaped early Jewish and Christian
interpretations of biblical dietary laws, attitudes towards animal sacrifice
and meat-eating, and practices related to feasting and fasting. On the other
hand, we will consider how the eating practices of Jews and Christians alike
were transformed in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple and the
cessation of Jewish (and later “pagan”) animal sacrifice. As such, we hope
that our discussions throughout the 2008-2009 academic year will also
resonate in interesting ways with the Department of Classical Studies’
interdisciplinary conference on “Meat: Killing, Consuming and Commodifying
Animals” in May 2009.
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